I have written before that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has secured the relatively few campus victories it has won this year at a cost. In particular, the movement’s leaders, who struggle to dispel the impression that BDS is anti-Semitic, have shown disrespect for Jewish students by holding significant votes on and around Passover. Now, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Student Judiciary of the Associated Students of Madison (ASM) has called this strategy by its proper name: religious discrimination.

At issue is a resolution concerning “investment transparency and human rights,” one piece of an ultimately successful campaign to get the ASM Council to support divestment from companies alleged to be complicit in violating the rights of Palestinians. The resolution in question was rushed to a vote on the second day of Passover, even though Ariela Rivkin, a Jewish member of the Council, pointed out that the Jewish “community which is deeply affected by these issues [would] not be able to attend or participate in the meeting due to religious observance.” Rivkin’s concerns were ignored. Indeed, the rules were suspended to enable the resolution to come to an initial vote more quickly than the Council’s bylaws allowed.

Rivkin and others then petitioned the Judiciary to invalidate the vote and sanction the chair of ASM, as well as Representative Katrina Morrison. Morrison had not only led the charge to push the resolution through but also dismissed the problem of holding the vote on Passover. It would be a “hassle,” she said, to schedule another meeting. She would later distinguish herself by publicly denouncing Rivkin and others for having the gall to petition the Judiciary.

Here is the Judiciary’s decision. It relies in part on a provision in ASM’s constitution that forbids discrimination on the basis of religion. Introducing “legislation that members of the Jewish community had expressed interest in, when it was known that these members would not be able to attend due to religious observance, does violate [that provision of] the Constitution.” It is “wholly unacceptable to discriminate against Jewish students by denying them their full opportunity to speak in front of Student Council regarding an issue they had expressed interest in.”

The Judiciary invalidated the vote, though the broader divestment resolution that passed at a subsequent meeting stands. The student Justices could not sanction the ASM chair who presided over the meeting, as she is no longer part of the student government, but they do suggest that “Chair Gosey attend a training on religious tolerance and understanding, so she may better understand how her actions harmed Jewish members of ASM. It is also recommended that she apologize to the campus Jewish community for her discriminatory acts as Chair during and before the April 12th meeting.”

As for Representative Morrison, who was recently elected chair of ASM, she is required to issue a statement explaining “why the nondiscrimination clause of the ASM constitution is essential, why Passover is important to the Jewish community, and apologizing to all Jewish council members.”

These sanctions may not seem to amount to much, but on college campuses, in which administrations have never honored a call to divest, BDS’s whole game is public relations. Being called out for religious discrimination is a public relations disaster. Ariela Rivkin and those who stood with her deserve credit for showing that not only administrators but also students can stand for justice against invidious discrimination.

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Americans no longer have the luxury of throwing up their hands in frustration over the confused situation on the ground in Syria. As the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov demonstrated, unpacking the bewildering complexity of the conditions that prevail on the ground now that the ISIS threat has receded leaves observers with the terrifying realization that great power conflict is not so difficult to imagine.

In the last week alone, according to Trofimov, Damascus looked the other way to allow U.S.-backed Kurdish proxies to fight forces loyal to Turkey, another American ally. That conflict is leading Turkey to threaten American troops, who are supporting Kurdish forces in an advisory capacity, raising the specter of armed conflict between two NATO allies. At the same time, the Syrian regime targeted a U.S.-held position in another part of the country, which led the U.S. to execute retaliatory strikes on those pro-regime forces—strikes that killed at least 100 pro-Syrian proxies and Syrian soldiers and a substantial number of Russian contractors. This is to say nothing of the increasingly hot war between Israeli forces and Iranian assets taking place in and over Syrian territory.

The situation in Syria is moving so fast that the article Trofimov published at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday was dated within hours of its publication. He noted that Moscow has remained “determinedly silent” over reports that American firepower killed a significant number of Russian civilians performing combat roles in a theater of war, even though reports indicated that those casualties were being treated in Ministry of Defense hospitals. Russia’s RIA news agency went so far as to call reports of hundreds of Russian casualties “classic disinformation.” Moscow’s caution has since disappeared.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed that a U.S. strike in the eastern Deir el-Zour province killed five Russian civilians. Informal estimates suggest the Russian death toll could be as high as 300. The formal acknowledgment that Russians died amid a barrage of American bombs represents a shift in Moscow’s tone and introduces a dangerously unpredictable political element to what was previously a tightly controlled dynamic.

The U.S.-Russian relationship in Syria has been a frosty one that had its share of risks. Russia’s direct intervention in the Syrian civil war began with strikes on anti-Assad militias covertly supported by the West and on the CIA-provided weapons depots that supplied them. Those strikes exposed to the world what had previously been a black program. Russian fighters have routinely harassed U.S. jets and unmanned aerial vehicles and invaded NATO airspace—a pattern that culminated in the downing of a Russian warplane over Turkish soil in the autumn of 2015. Meanwhile, Syrian insurgents have been filmed destroying Russian armor and helicopters using sophisticated U.S. weaponry.

As both Russian and American direct involvement in Syria has deepened and mutual hostility intensified, so, too, has the danger. In July 2016, Russian aircraft targeted a base of operations used to train anti-Assad rebel forces, which had only been evacuated by U.S. and British Special Forces 24 hours before it was destroyed. Four days later, Russian warplanes razed a CIA facility near the Jordanian border that housed the families of rebel soldiers. In March of last year, Russian and Syrian air assets targeted U.S.-backed Syrian Arab Coalition fighters in the town of Al-Bab, raining ordnance down on positions just three kilometers away from where U.S. commandos were located.

It’s a small consolation that both sides of this conflict were once committed to denying that they were prosecuting a proxy war against each other. That comforting fiction is, apparently, no longer operative. Moscow’s decision to admit that American forces are directly responsible for Russian deaths adds an element of volatility to an already tense situation. If roles were reversed, it’s hardly inconceivable that the American public would demand a response to that kind of Russian aggression. Nor is it difficult to foresee a scenario in which Russia’s political leaders see political utility in banging the drum over America’s unchecked recklessness and hostility in Syria. Once that dynamic sets in, there’s no telling where and how it ends.

Every nation with forces on the ground or in the skies over Syria has interests in that country that are regarded as vital. Those nations have sunk costs into the preservation of those interests, and that investment is not going to be abandoned any time soon. The prospect of an accidental engagement between two nations with conflicting interests cannot be dismissed. If such a clash were to occur, the mechanisms by which it might be defused and tensions resolved are untested and could fail. The result could be a cascading series of disproportionate escalations—a cycle from which there is no face-saving way out. That is the stuff of nightmares.

Americans and Russians are now shooting at one another on faraway battlefields—a fateful situation that representatives of both nations have desperately sought to avoid. We can only hope that everyone recognizes the terrible danger of the game they’re playing.

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For those who want radical changes in the way the United States handles guns and shooters, what else can be done but amending the Constitution to supplant the Second Amendment? That’s the question I ask Noah Rothman and Abe Greenwald on this edition of the COMMENTARY Magazine podcast, which also addresses rising Republican fortunes in national polling. Give a listen.

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When conservatives and conscience-addled liberals fret about the rising influence of censorious students on college campuses, the overwhelming response they get from skeptics is “who cares?” Those who do not outright defend creeping radicalism on campus are prone to minimize the threat of violence and fanaticism. While obtuse, this approach does have some immediate political utility. Dismissing events on campus as the antics of a few misguided kids casts those who care about such affairs as obsessive cranks who fixate on matters of no objective consequences. It goes without saying that not everyone is sincere who wonders aloud about the relevance of maximalist rhetoric, racial intolerance, and even violence on campus, but some are. They deserve an answer. Why should we care about rigidly enforced intellectual cloistering on campuses?

Those who contend that conservatives, in particular, overstate the threat on campus make several claims. These are the works of only a handful of misguided “college kids,” they contend. The few instances of extreme behavior on campus are not suggestive of any broader societal trend and don’t merit much attention. In fact, the limited scope of the problem, therefore, suggests that that conservative indignation is false–a convenient way to avoid confronting anti-social behavior among their ideological compatriots. All of this is fallacious.

First, to focus on the number of college students (not “kids,” almost all are of majority age) engaged in the aggressive censorship primarily of conservative speakers is to miss the point. Whole books have been written on the radicalization of American college students. This is not a limited phenomenon, but trying to quantify its appeal is an effort to counter an argument no one is making. Those who recognize the peril of this terrible new fad are focused more on the ideas expressed than the precise number of individuals expressing them.

Last night, for example, a group of students at Brown University was refreshingly forthright about those ideas when they called for the cancelation of a planned speech by TownHall editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson. In a statement, the students railed against anyone who would advocate the “freedom” of “any person to make hateful, oppressive, or damaging remarks.” They added, “There is a wealth of writing on the inextricable connection between Benson’s ideologies—fiscal conservatism and free market ideology—and real, tangible, state violence against marginalized communities.” That is to say, the Bill of Rights and laissez-faire economics beget violence and racism—threats to life and liberty that legitimize virtually any reaction. It’s practically self-defense.

Confusing speech with violence and violence with speech is not merely the invention of these misguided Brown students. This bewildering delusion long ago migrated into the real world, where thought leaders and policymakers have embraced it. It is, however, fair to say that the intellectual foundations for this view of speech were set on American campuses and it is there that they are being used to justify proactivity and preemption.

“When someone calls a black person the ‘n’ word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought,” read a 2012 editorial in the Harvard Crimson. “They are committing an act of violence.” In 2017, a Wellesley College op-ed took this thought to its logical conclusion: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” A violent demonstration at Middlebury College for which five dozen students were disciplined after a professor was injured following a near-riot in response to author Charles Murray is the rare exception to the rule. Most anti-speech demonstrations on and off campus are peaceful; at least, for now. But the logic of coercive force to silence offensive speech is inescapable, and it has far broader purchase than these students’ defenders are willing to admit.

A 2015 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that nearly 71 percent of freshmen believed that colleges should “prohibit racist/sexist speech.” At 43 percent, a strong plurality of surveyed freshmen agreed colleges should “have the right to ban extreme speakers” from campus. These ideas didn’t spring up ex nihilo; they were taught. The institute’s 2010-11 survey of college administrators, professors, and staff found that nearly 70 percent of female college faculty and almost half of their male counterparts believed that colleges should “prohibit” speech deemed racist or sexist.

Occasionally, sotto voce censorship finds a full-throated advocate like New York University vice Provost Ulrich Baer. In an April 2017 New York Times op-ed, he heaped praise on the “snowflakes,” as he approvingly called them, who use aggressive tactics to compel educational institutions to deny conservative speakers a platform. He justified this by contending that these students are only seeking to “no-platform” overtly racist speakers and limit the exposure of minority students to environments in which they feel threatened. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these faculty members chose not to define what constitutes dangerous speech because they appreciate the overly broad definitions to which their students adhere. Prospective speakers like Ben Shapiro, Condoleezza Rice, Jason Riley, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were not forced off campus because they countenance the views of the noxious alt-right.

Radicalization never occurs in a vacuum, and militancy and extremism is not exclusive to left-leaning students. This kind of uncompromising behavior results in reciprocal reactions from college Republicans, who are increasingly convinced that civility in the face of these affronts amounts to unilateral disarmament. This mentality begets a dangerous cycle best exemplified by the willingness of college Republican groups to invite poisonous speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos to address students not because he has anything of value to say but because it inspires their counterparts on the left to set their campus on fire.

In an open letter published in the Weekly Standard, UCLA professor Gabriel Rossman ably contended that this new conservative infatuation with provocation for its own sake is a byproduct of their orphanage on campus. “[T]he ideological skew of academia is that the dearth of conservative faculty means a lack of mentorship for conservative students,” he contended. A 2016 study of faculty voter registration in departments like economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology found Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a staggering 11.5 to 1. This disparity leads professors to feel comfortable misstating conservative ideas and reveling in divisive identity politics. It also leads students who are offended by those remarks to harass those professors into hiding.

None of this is healthy, and it does students no favors when conservatives who notice this suboptimal state of affairs are mocked for their concern. This has been years in the making. It is an outgrowth of the infantile “safe space” movement, opposition to which has cost faculty their jobs. It is a byproduct of the appeal of segregation based on racial, political, gender, and sexual identity. After all, exposure to people of distinct backgrounds and views amounts to what Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro called “uncomfortable learning.” It is imprudent, even reckless, to gamble that students who embrace extremism in college will outgrow it in the real world, particularly when it is being nurtured in them by their elders.

Observers on both sides of the political divide who have spoken out against radicalism on campus are not engaged in projection or dissociation. Quite the opposite, in fact; they are choosing not to look away. It is neither noble nor enlightened to witness thuggish authoritarianism and react with sarcasm for the benefit of the viewing audience on social media. There’s no risk in criticizing the contestants in the arena from the bleachers. History won’t look kindly on such cowardice, particularly if the toxic ideologies gestating in America’s collegiate hothouses survive in their hosts when they leave campus.

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Yes. That’s the answer to a question posed by the headline of Shmuel Rosner’s latest piece in the New York Times. Yes: Israeli students need to visit Auschwitz. All Jewish students should. Plenty of non-Jews, too.

Rosner disagrees. His piece, pegged to the news of Poland’s decision to “outlaw claims of Polish complicity in the Holocaust,” misguidedly argues that trips in which Israeli students visit the Polish death camps should end because “they contribute to a misperception by many Jews that remembering the Holocaust is the main feature of Judaism,” and because “they perpetuate the myth that Israel itself is born only of the ashes of Europe.”

Rosner goes on to cite a Pew study which found that “73 percent of American Jews believe ‘remembering the Holocaust’ is essential to being Jewish.” Rosner may mourn this statistic, but memory, in general, is a key part of Judaism. It’s also not entirely clear to me why anyone would consider it problematic for a people to prioritize the commemoration of the worst period in the entire history of their peoplehood. Maybe Rosner would also object to celebrating Passover, a holiday all about memory and remembrance.

If Rosner is truly concerned that Israeli students will exit Auschwitz with the belief that “Israel itself is born only of the ashes of Europe,” he should focus on improving the Israeli education system. I, for one, do not believe for a moment that students educated about the history of their own country would leave Poland with this assumption. If they did, it means their schooling needs to be improved, not that these trips need to be canceled.

The other piece of this is that we’re fighting a losing battle. How many Jews care today about the Spanish Inquisition? How many feel a visceral reaction when hearing the names Ferdinand and Isabella? We should be encouraging and funding more educational missions that solidify our remembrance of, and connection to our ancestors’ pasts. The farther away we get from the years of the Holocaust, the easier it will be to make denials—and those denials will be increasingly persuasive. That Rosner has concluded anything other than this from Poland’s recent decision is beyond baffling.

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My former colleagues at The Wall StreetJournal recently unearthed what should be a major political scandal. It involves an anti-American government, a prominent member of Congress, and a far-right group that traffics in anti-Semitism, homophobia, and conspiracy theories. In the current climate of anxiety about “collusion” and the alt-right, you would think the liberal media would give this story top billing.

You would think wrong. Nearly a week later, the prestige press is still giving the Journal exposé the chirping-crickets treatment. Perhaps that’s because the foreign regime in question is the Islamic Republic of Iran, the member of Congress is Democratic National Committee Deputy Chairman Keith Ellison, and the far-right group is the Nation of Islam.

The original Journal report by Jeryl Bier appeared in the op-ed pages. It meticulously detailed a 2013 meeting in New York hosted by Iranian President Hasan Rouhani and attended by Ellison and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “The Nation of Islam website documents the event,” Bier wrote, “noting that Mr. Rouhani ‘hosted the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Muslim leaders from different Islamic communities and members of the U.S. Congress at a private meeting.'” Several Nation of Islam outlets reported Ellison’s participation at the time, and the Minnesota representative hasn’t denied the story.

The episode raises serious questions about Ellison’s judgment and his real ideological convictions.

Ellison has spent much of his political career running away from Farrakhan. His ties to the group almost derailed his first congressional run, in 2006. After it emerged that he had worked with the Nation of Islam for at least 18 months in the 1990s, Ellison wrote a letter to the Jewish community distancing himself from Farrakhan and denouncing his “anti-Semitic statements and actions.” Ellison reiterated his opposition to the group’s “anti-Semitism” and “homophobia” in 2016 when he contested the DNC leadership.

But revulsion at his former associates in the Nation of Islam didn’t stop Ellison from breaking bread with Farrakhan in 2013–bread that was provided by the Tehran regime. So which is the real Ellison: The one who drafts earnest letters of apology to Jewish groups? Or the one who, as recently as 2013, saw it fit to dine with Farrakhan under Iranian auspices?

The Ellison-Farrakhan-Rouhani shindig is also a reminder that progressive Democrats had no compunction about hobnobbing with representatives of an anti-American terror state–until recently, that is. Today, Ellison is among the party’s loudest tub-thumpers regarding claims of Trump-Russian “collusion.” Yet he met privately with the Iranian president two years after the Obama administration’s Justice Department uncovered a plot by the Tehran regime to assassinate the Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil.

Ellison does not appear to have done anything illegal in meeting with Rouhani. Nor does this revelation neutralize or invalidate concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Republicans and conservatives can be forgiven for wondering if the Democrats’ newfound and highly selective hawkishness is a genuine effort to reckon with national-security realities or a ploy in a political game.

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